Hi Chris
We are close to release a new tool that will help in this task: TGVInpaint. This is an inpaint process, that may be used to remove stars, blooming, etc. This process has an inbuilt precondition routine that tries to preserve image features, and then a smoothing phase, where intensities are matched, and also gradients.
The result is often too smooth, but we may recover the texture with a noise generator (we are going to release an enhanced tool for that purpose).
The most critical step for doing this is the mask generation. Right now we may use StarMask or the detection routines in StarAlign, but I think that more work is needed to fulfit the needs of an optimal star removal (morphologival filters, merge different masks for different star sizes, or even remove some details that do not belong to stars).
Stay tuned.